Throughout their 40-year existence, Wire have striven to both obliterate and preserve their past. The post-punk pioneers’ discography is one of abrupt but clean breaks, with prolonged periods of inactivity that neatly group their records into distinct phases—which the band and fans cheekily refer to as Marks, like upgraded models of the same sports car. It’s almost as if they’ve always approached their work as discrete discs in a career-retrospective box set, with each era defined by a specific aesthetic approach or change in personnel.
Not surprisingly, for a band so self-aware of their legacy, Wire have been very selective about what songs make it onto their official albums. At the same time, they’re not ones to let leftovers go to waste—they’re committed to giving aborted material its proper due and consideration, no matter if it takes several years to work it into proper shape. Their 2013 release, Change Become Us, comprised updated versions of songs written in 1980 but only captured on a crude live recording from the era. The new Nocturnal Koreans likewise salvages scrapped material, though its shelf life can be measured in months rather than decades—the mini-LP features eight songs that were recorded alongside the 11 featured on Wire’s 2015 self-titled effort, but didn’t make it onto the album.
According to the band, the songs featured on Wire lent themselves to more of a live approach, whereas the tracks compiled on and reworked for Nocturnal Koreans encouraged a greater degree of studio manipulation. But the two releases still sound like byproducts of the same moment—Wire was hardly lacking for textural trickery, while Nocturnal Koreans accommodates a couple of rockers. Furthermore, the atypical tools employed here (trumpet, lap-steel guitar) are treated less as feature attractions than soluble materials to be mutated and absorbed into the band’s soundstream. Whereas Wire effectively found this perennially re-inventive band settling into a comfort zone of sorts, forging the melodic middle ground between post-punk whirr and Krautrock swirl, Nocturnal Koreans uses that album’s brisk, motorik pop as its jumping-off point. Chronicling an experience with mid-tour insomnia, the opening title track masterfully mediates between inner-city tension and dream-world reverie, with frontman Colin Newman’s bleary-eyed mental haze (“I dressed in my shower before I awoke”) rendered through an encroaching, droning buzz that gradually blurs the edges of the song’s incessant backbeat.
True to that nighttime scene-setter, Nocturnal Koreans ranks among Wire’s most musically relaxed releases, with Newman mostly singing in calm, sometimes hushed tones. But it’s only relaxed in the sense that a sleepless night in your bedroom is relaxed—the pillows and sheets feel familiar, but your thoughts are riddled with anxieties over the unknown. While the droll, dry “Internal Exile” may deliver its critique of cutthroat capitalism with a smirk (“Hearts of gold/ No pot to piss in/ Join the queue of future has-beens”), its tense acoustic stalk and prodding chorus apply palpable pressure. The more wiry—and typically Wire-y— “Numbered” packs in a cheeky callback to one of the band’s signature songs (“You think I’m a number/ Still willing to rhumba”), yet that knowing nod only reinforces the new track’s doomsday messaging. Those apocalyptic intimations are rendered all the more starkly through the dead-of-night stillness of “Forward Motion,” whose eerie, frosty ambience swells into a mushroom cloud of lingering cold-war paranoia.
It’s easy to see how something like “Forward Position” was deemed too much of an aesthetic outlier to fit in with the Wire tracklist. But there are also a handful of tracks here (“Dead Weight,” “Still,” “Pilgrim Trade”) that seem like mere victims of attrition—functional, pro-forma songs that try to boost their mid-tempo pulse by piling on synth and noise textures. So when bassist Graham Lewis steps up to take his lone, lead vocal on the closing “Fishes Bones,” it’s a welcome jolt, his leering lyrics (“The back door’s open, are you needing a boost?/ Inside is where my chicken roost”) providing an absurdist counterpoint to Newman’s more contemplative observations. As per Wire’s 21st century M.O., it’s a song that obliquely references the band’s prior work—in this case, the strobe-lit, lockstep assault of late-’80s standards like “(A Berlin) Drill.” But it uses nostalgia like a slingshot, pulling back to the past as a means to shoot forth into the future.
